Pop and Policy – Rants and Tirades and How I fell in Love with Buck 65

POp Montreal 2007 – BUck 65.

Before getting Patti Smith pissed at me (fuck fuck fuck, I love her. Oh well.) I saw Buck and Scratch Bastid on a panel with Owen Chapman who is an associate Prof in the same department where I did my masters at Concordia, and a Prof Stern from Concordia Art History who studies intellectual property, and a lawyer named Susan Abramovitch.

This panel was really cool and friendly and funky-ass at first, as we got to hear about what Buck 65 and Scratch Bastid had been through with their recent album. How they’d had to adapt it to replace the samples their label wouldn’t let them use, or couldn’t clear. Buck told a small group of us talking later that there were some songs that benefited from this process of having live musicians reinterpret samples. But other songs didn’t come out quite right and he thinks maybe he’ll always regret that.

Anyway, all was sweet and swimming until Prof Stern pointed out that the majority of music is owned by large corporations and questioned whether we should include issues of ethics and morality into conversations about art. At this point Abramovitch (dubbed “viper” by an audience member I spoke with after) turned on her fellow panelist. His ideas and concerns were “retro” and essentially irrelevant because all the cases she deals with now involve artists who own their rights. This could have been a really interesting, galvanizing moment if the moderator had called on some of the artists in the crowd who had had their hands up from the beginning, but instead it seemed she called on vitriolic adults in suits, “figures” she knew by name, and so it turned into a snark match largely between an older guard of people who don’t live the reality of emerging music makers in the new digital environment.

I spoke with J’aime Tambeur of the Unicorns and Islands and Awesome afterwards. He was eloquently infuriated about not getting a chance to say his piece. His instant and intelligent rebuttal to Abramovitch would have faced her with the fact that when we’re dealing with sampling, it has little importance what she’s seeing go across her desk these days.

The reality is that the majority of music in the world, everything produced before the change that started around 2000 where the tide tipped here in North America, is still owned by 4 companies (which may be 3 soon) and so these are the companies you need to engage with to sample. And it’s not the fact that they’re big companies that makes them evil, it’s just kind of in how they behave.

As Buck pointed out, when he was able to come to a resolution for a song he wanted to sample he had to pay 3000$, and not 1 dollar of that went to the artist who recorded the song. It all went to the rights holder, one of the big 4. And look at Jammie Thompson.

Buck was the best person on the panel, cracking me up consistently but also making telling points about his own desire to make music no matter what, to tour to make his living as most artists do, to release what he makes on the internet whether people know instantly it’s him or not (which he’s been doing gleefully for a while now, thanks). In conversation afterwards he made it pretty clear that after he pays Warner the last record their owed in his deal he’ll probably return to being indie. On his site he wrote this:

One last thing – I don’t want you to think that I think you’re a bad person if you download music (illegally). I’ve done it myself. I’ve heard from lots of people who’ve told me stories of downloading my stuff, but who’ve offered for me to stay in their house when I’m in their town. Real generosity. I appreciate that. And I know that times are tough. Heck, a check for ten bucks even showed up in the mail the other day from someone who downloaded something. They said they didn’t have the money at the time, but when they had it, they passed it along. Incredible. Maybe that’s how the world should work… I don’t know.